I don’t think I need to tell you folks that the coverage of Cecil the Lion being hunted and killed has long since got out of hand. The man who killed the lion, Minneapolis dentist Walter Palmer, has been targeted for social media outrage including people calling for his physical harm and publishing his private…

What do you do when the masses threaten to turn on a high-profile and very controversial diplomatic deal? Placate them with celebrities, it seems. “Morgan Freeman, Jack Black and a host of other celebrities star in a video backing Americas’ nuclear deal with Iran, wise-cracking their way through an often surreal mixture of Hollywood, politics…

Over at Watchdog today I have an article up about a study linking fracking to high school dropout rates (my previous post here). Two experts I spoke to told me the correlation between fracking and dropout rates wasn’t a good one. “I don’t think it’s just a boom in energy. A manufacturing boom would have…

For years UND President Robert Kelley has argued that what was prompting his move to get rid of the controversial “Fighting Sioux” nickname and logo was the NCAA. To hear Kelley tell it, if it weren’t for the NCAA threatening sanctions against the university for using the logo/nickname, UND would have kept it. Kelley has…

North Dakota’s crime report for 2014 is out and, not surprisingly, it’s a mix bag of good and bad news. “We do have some good news, and we have some very, very alarming bad news,” Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem said during a press event about the report today. You can read the full report below.…

Back in June a group of opponents of the controversial Common Core standards, a group including state Rep. Bob Skarphol (R-Tioga), filed a lawsuit arguing that the State of North Dakota entered into an unconstitutional interstate compact when it embraced the policy. Interstate compacts are allowed by the states, but must be ratified by Congress,…

Valley News Live has published a press release they received from Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota regarding the secretly recorded video of the group’s officials discussing the sale of baby body parts. “Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota warned news outlets today that airing undercover videos from the Center…

“Study links oil fracking to higher dropout rates,” reads headline from Grand Forks Herald education reporter Jennifer Johnson. “Fracking increased the high school dropout rates among teenage males more than females from 2000 to 2013, according to the study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research,” reports Johnson. “For every 0.1 percentage point increase in the…

Earlier this week I wrote a funny story about a report that the rate of North Dakota’s oil well completions had fallen off a cliff. Reuters market analyst John Kemp wrote about it in a column on Wednesday. “No new well completion reports have been filed in North Dakota since July 10, the longest gap this…

This letter to the editor by Eric Burin has appeared in a few of the state’s newspapers, and I’ve heard others making a similar argument as well. Burin argues that the decision by county records here in North Dakota – one in Stark County (Dickinson) and one in Walsh County (Grafton) – to authorize someone…